Irish authors included on TIME Must-Read Books of 2024

Sally Rooney's "Intermezzo" and Colm Tóibín's "Long Island" have been included among TIME magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of 2024. 

Sally Rooney's much anticipated fourth novel and Colm Tóibín's follow-up novel to the smash-hit "Brooklyn" have both made it to the TIME magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of the Year.

TIME's selection is described as "gripping novels and short stories, eye-opening histories, moving memoirs, and more. These are the books that entertained and enlightened us."

"Intermezzo" by Sally Rooney

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Sally Rooney.

Sally Rooney's novel "Intermezzo" was released in September and was treated by midnight release parties along with online debates. 

The novel follows "Peter and Ivan, Dublin brothers with a hefty age gap, are untethered and grieving the death of their father, seeking solace, or at least distraction, in their relationships with women. Peter—the older brother at 32, a financially successful lawyer—is mentally gutted, torturing himself with guilt over a relationship with a college student he can’t take seriously while still pining for his first love.

"Ivan—the baby at 22, brilliant but socially awkward and slower to launch—is half-heartedly pursuing a career in chess when he meets and falls for a 36-year-old divorcée. It’s Ivan’s new romance that the brothers can’t stop fighting about, dredging up arguments about what it means for members of a family to respect, love, and care for one another. At the time when they need each other most, Peter and Ivan just keep pushing each other away."

TIME magazine points out that in "Intermezzo", "Rooney employs two distinctive narrative voices to tell an immersive story about the brothers’ fight to feel whole again after their shattering loss."

Colm Tóibín's "Long Island"

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Colm Toibin.

Following the success of Tóibín's 2009 novel "Brooklyn", which was made into the hugely successful movie starring Saoirse Ronan, the Wexford novelist is back with its follow-up "Long Island. 

The novel "picks up nearly 25 years after Eilis Lacey emigrated from Ireland and secretly married an Italian American plumber. The book begins in 1976, and Eilis, now in her 40s, lives in the titular suburbs outside of New York City with her husband Tony, their two teenagers, and a host of intrusive in-laws.

"Bored with the stay-at-home mom routine, Eilis longs for some excitement. Unfortunately, she finds it in the form of an irate Irishman who claims his wife is having Tony’s baby. The news of her husband’s infidelity—and his family’s blasé reaction to it—encourages Eilis to return to Ireland for the first time in nearly two decades. With apprehension and wonder, Tóibín writes of Eilis’s journey to find herself in the one place she thought she had outgrown."

Find more gems on the TIME 100 Must-Read Book list here.